Thrills, spills and tragedy – what a year it has been

Maybe you can think of a year when football in Scotland produced such
turbulence as it did in 2008 – but I can’t.

Much loved: Tommy Smith's passing prompted both sides of the Old Firm to unite in griefPhoto: PA

By Roddy Forsyth

3:33PM GMT 25 Dec 2008

January opened with Scottish fans celebrating three teams in Europe for the first time in 38 years. By December, Celtic had to beat Villarreal for the country to avoid the ignominy of failing to register a single win against European opposition for the first season ever.

In January, too, George Burley succeeded Alex McLeish as manager of Scotland.

Burley’s advocates cited his thrilling, but brief, spell at top of the SPL with Hearts in 2005. By November, his seven games in charge had produced fewer victories than mutinies – one win over Iceland against two defections by Lee McCulloch and Kris Boyd.

Gretna, though we could not appreciate it, were to provide us with a preview of the global financial meltdown in microcosm. The first team ever to move up through all four divisions in successive seasons, their progress was out of all proportion to their true resources.

In fact, their sole asset was the benevolence of Brooks Mileson and when he became seriously ill for the last time, the club was exposed as a house of cards.

Gretna should have gone under in the spring, but because of an imbalance in their games against Celtic and Rangers their demise would have had an instant impact on an already contentious title race.

The SPL kept Gretna alive until June, but the inevitable collapse saw the club lose their ground, status and identity – and left local suppliers and creditors to discover that toxic debt began at home.

Mileson’s crucial error was that he did not recognise the club’s limits and provide them with the means to live within them.

Still, he had been a vivid figure in the Scottish game and his passing completed a melancholy first half of the year. Phil O’Donnell’s fatal collapse against Dundee United occurred at the end of 2007, but the impact reverberated for the rest of the season.

The games called off because of his death added to the fixture backlog of both Gretna and Motherwell, whose groundsharing arrangement put an insupportable burden on the Fir Park pitch, while the New Year Old Firm derby at Parkhead had to be rescheduled repeatedly until it became part of a supercharged finale to the title race.

By that stage, Rangers’ unexpected and astonishing progress to the Uefa Cup final, along with postponements and Scottish Cup replays, had mired Walter Smith’s players in a welter of fixtures. They were also caught up in a major conflict of interests with Celtic, whose chief executive, Peter Lawwell stood against easing their burden by an extension of the SPL season, citing ‘the integrity of the league’.

Amidst increasingly bitter and polarised arguments, the most emotive event of the year occurred with the death of Tommy Burns.

A moratorium was declared in the fixtures debate, thousands of supporters from both sides of the Old Firm divide left their tributes outside Celtic Park and the country witnessed the spectacle of Walter Smith and Ally McCoist acting as pall bearers for a much loved friend and greatly respected rival.

Had he died only a few days later, the last round of fixtures would have been put back, probably into June, with consequences for clubs, players, broadcasters and international commitments – not to mention arguments about the integrity of the league.

It was oddly appropriate to the regard in which Burns was held that even the date of his passing spared the Scottish game a potentially calamitous bout of recrimination.

He would, surely, have been glad of that.

The scan for Scan must continue

So, farewell then, 2008 – but not this column’s mission to track down Ian Scanlon – aka ‘Scan’ or ‘Scanny’ – former hero of fans of Aberdeen, St Mirren and Notts County, but now a reclusive figure to rival Howard Hughes or Osama Bin Laden.

The archivists of those clubs along with fans’ websites joined in the hunt, as did the managers of Celtic, Motherwell and the Scotland under-21 side, but although Gordon Strachan, Mark McGhee and Billy Stark contributed splendid anecdotes of Scanlon’s eccentric habits – and his ability to madden a bloke called Ferguson who used to be manager at Aberdeen – he continues to elude our grasp.

A certain mischief has crept into some readers’ tips about Scanny’s whereabouts, so that we have pursued ‘sightings’ that turned out to include, not the Pimpernel-like former winger, but a Midwest contributor to Barrack Obama’s campaign fund and the bass guitarist of Econoline who, as Telegraph readers will know, are exponents of grind-pop.

The latest chase was called off when we identified the Ian Scanlon in question as a Biomedical researcher, whose work has taken him into the unScanny realms of gamma-Glutamyl Hydrolase, Antineoplastic Agents as well as the creepy sounding (but properly scientific) subject of Nude Mice.

Meanwhile, another newspaper has got in on the hunt and claimed to have picked up fresh scent only to find their sense of smell had let them down badly. Pah!

However, since St Mirren would like to have him on a float in the parade to their new ground in five weeks time, we urge fresh vigilance amongst our search parties. The scan for Scan must not fail.

Motherwell’s hot air tires Burrows

Alan Burrows, Motherwell’s press officer, was somewhat harassed on Tuesday morning, when he was responsible for gathering together the manager and a selection of players for the benefit of daily and Sunday newspapers, TV and radio broadcasters, press agencies and photographers.

Was the effort too much for him?

Not so. The cause was a soft tyre on Mark McGhee’s car. The manager sent Alan off to get it re-inflated, a mission which took him around a surprisingly large slice of North Lanarkshire.

And you would think, with all the hot air that comes out of press conferences…

And, speaking of Motherwell, the club announcer gets the 2008 award for most effective mocking fanfare. In their first game after losing the Uefa Cup final to Zenit St Petersburg in May, Rangers were away to Motherwell.

The downcast Ibrox players took the field at Fir Park to the resounding chorus of the Beatles’ ‘Back in the USSR’. Thus demoralised, they dropped the points that gave Celtic the crucial edge that took Gordon Strachan’s team to a third successive title.